


sing me a song of a lass who is gone

by violentdarlings



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Kissing, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 14:11:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8670625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: Newt Scamander has scars.
So does Leta Lestrange.
Formerly 'lovely, dark and deep'.





	1. sing me a song

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Outlander theme song.

When Newt asks himself later how it happened, he’ll remember the sequence of events, but it still won’t make sense. Seeing her in Flourish and Blotts, eyes meeting across the bookstore; an invitation to dine, and here he is, in Leta Lestrange’s tiny, cramped apartment, the evidence of her everywhere. A pair of high heeled shoes tossed carelessly by the door, the desk stacked with parchment covered in her scrawling handwriting, an empty teacup sitting abandoned on the side table.

She’s in the other room, fussing with the tea tray; it’s unexpectedly domestic. Somehow, when he was wandering the world, as he was traversing his five continents and hundred countries, he never pictured Leta sitting in in a too-small flat, reading quietly, sipping tea. This two-room flat, this ordinary life, seems too mundane, too commonplace, to be associated with the girl who had once been, along with his beloved creatures, the bright centre of his world.

“I don’t even know what it is you do,” he says softly, and there is a curse and a tinkle of china as Leta drops a teacup.

“ _Reparo_ ,” she mutters. “I’m a journalist for the Prophet,” she calls, coming through the doorway, bearing the tea tray in her hands, complete with mended cup. “I write the cleaning column.” Newt blinks at her.

“The… cleaning column,” he says, utterly bemused. Leta nods.

“Under the guise of a middle-aged witch who lives in Essex and devotes her life to getting stains out of tea towels.” Newt can’t hold back a laugh. “It’s a foot in the door,” Leta protests, but she’s smiling. “Someday before the next turn of the century I might even get to write about something interesting.”

“I sincerely hope you do,” Newt says soberly. Leta sets down the tray and settles her hands on her hips; it is suddenly, brutally familiar, the same pose she used to take when she was cross with him for not doing his Transfiguration homework.

“Take your shoes off, if you please,” Leta directs, and Newt looks down to see his battered boots tracking mud all over the faded carpet. And now he’s blushing, and isn’t that marvellous.

“My apologies,” Newt mutters, and bends down to wrestle with his bootlaces, even as they remain stubbornly knotted. _Merlin’s beard, use your bloody wand!_ chides a little voice in his head that sounds disturbingly like his older brother. But even as Newt’s reaching for his wand Leta is there, pushing him gently into the armchair by the fire, sinking to her knees in one graceful motion.

“Allow me,” she says, looking up at him, her dark eyes glinting like jewels, and it does something to his heart, to see her kneeling there by his side, like she has never been away.

“Leta, don’t –” Newt begins, but her small hands are already untangling his laces, pulling off his left boot, hesitating only a moment before easing off his sock as well. And then the other, and Newt opens his eyes, realises they’d drifted closed at the sheer relief of her hands on him. Like his very skin has a hunger, and she’s the only one who can sate it.

Newt can’t bear it, to be here, surrounded by the trivial evidence of Leta Lestrange’s life without him, as though she had never felt an acute and agonising pull under her ribs as he had felt, when they had been parted. As though she has not spent the intervening years missing him like a lost limb, a broken heart.

“I’m sorry,” Newt blurts, jumping up out of his chair, but that only makes it worse. Leta is still kneeling, as inscrutable as ever, gazing up at him with her black opal eyes. “For Merlin’s sake, Leta, get up,” Newt says, and pulls her up, perhaps too roughly, although she does not cry out. He does not like this tension between them, like he is a spring coiled too tight, liable to do something he regrets at any moment. And yet, there is a thrill to it, to being so close to her, the light scent of her hair, the perfume of her skin.

“Better, Newt?” she asks, and oh, his name, his nickname in her voice, like the years have fallen away.

“Better,” he manages, gaze fixed on her face, her soft cheeks, her mouth, gods, her _mouth_ , and he’s still holding her by the shoulders and what must she _think_ –

Newt drops his arms like he’s been burned. “I should go,” he mumbles, and turns away, but Leta’s there, crowding into his space, and Newt can’t think.

“Don’t go,” Leta says, a world of promise in just the flutter of her eyelid and the crook of her smile. “I mean. You don’t have to go just yet. You could stay.”

“I shouldn’t,” Newt mutters, but he’s already edging back, drawn irresistibly into her orbit.

“Why not?” Leta asks, and she’s so close, he can count her eyelashes, the tiny flickers of colour in her irises.

“It’s not decent,” Newt says, and gestures between them both, as if his hands alone can convey how very wrong it is to be here with her, alone, and the sofa like a bed beside them. Leta smiles, and it’s gentle, like he’s pleased her somehow. “I mean it!” Newt insists, his voice rising at the end of the sentence, because why is she smiling at him like that, why does she have to look at him like he’s something, like he’s _hers_.

“Newton Scamander,” she says, her voice a caress, like she can reach him to the bone with words alone. “I missed you so.” Startled, Newt blinks at her.

“And I you,” he replies, before he can think better of it. She’s leaning forward, and Newt knows what he should do here, should back away and never come back, but it’s been so long and he’s so very tired.

Leta kisses him, light as a feather, and Newt can’t help it. He deepens the kiss without even thinking about it; it might have been years since he walked through this particular dance but he still remembers the steps, fingertips at her jaw, her hand sweeping through his hair. Leta makes a soft, pleased noise in her throat, and Newt presses closer.

He’d never even considered that this could be possible. Yet he can’t deny he’s thought of it, defiantly imagined what it would be like, in the still hours between dusk and dawn, on prairies and plains, in forests and deserts. Leta had never really left him, not truly; Newt had carried her with him, in his suitcase and in his heart, ever since that day, so long ago now, when he’d looked at her and seen a woman almost grown, the scabbed kneed child she’d been vanished without a trace. It had been such a profound realisation that Newt had almost choked on his toast and someone had had to thump him hard on the back. But how could he not have noticed, seeing her there, smiling at him from across the Great Hall, her face slowly losing the roundness of childhood, as lovely and as out of reach as the moon.

She’s not out of reach now. Newt has his hands on her back, and she’s kissing him with such sweetness it makes his head spin. “What are we doing here, Leta?” Newt asks, when she pulls back to kiss the hollow of his throat. Leta chuckles, and the vibration of it rumbles down to Newt’s bones.

“if you can’t guess, then perhaps I’m doing it wrong,” she replies, and pulls her wand from her pocket, waves it briefly; the sofa converts itself rather abruptly into a bed.

“Oh,” Newt says. “That.” Leta smiles, wicked and bright, her fingers starting in on his waistcoat, slipping it from his shoulders. “I didn’t think you’d ever thought of me this way,” Newt confesses. Leta’s dark eyes flick up to his, for a moment unrestrainedly surprised.

“You were the first person I ever thought of this way,” she says, and Newt makes a noise in his throat he’s never quite heard himself make before.

“Come here,” he says, his voice dropping, and Leta comes willingly, letting him seize her by the hips, his fingers digging into her skin. It can’t be comfortable, but Newt hardly cares, because how can she say things like that and not expect fire to ignite in his blood. Leta responds just as fiercely as he’s dared to imagine in his most fevered dreams, kissing him wildly, her hands flitting everywhere over him, his chest, his shoulders, and back to his chest to unbutton his shirt rather savagely, buttons flinging everywhere.

Leta gasps, and it recalls Newt back to himself. He looks down, only to be greeted by the train wreck of his torso and upper arms, his shirt hanging half off, every single flaw on display. Newt flinches, his shoulders hunching in on himself reflexively. He should have remembered. He’s too ruined, too scarred, for someone as flawless as Leta –

Newt pulls away from her, dimly aware he’s shaking.

“I’m sorry,” he says, arms crossing instinctively over his chest, hiding the bite marks and the claw scars, all the evidence of his unconventional life. “You probably weren’t expecting – all that.”

Leta’s eyes are wide. “Oh, Newt,” she says, her hands coming up to cradle his head in her hands like he’s something precious. “You’ve been busy.” Newt chokes out a shocked laugh.

“Just a trifle,” he says, and Leta drops the half-discarded shirt onto the floor, pressing her lips to his collarbone, and Newt forgets to be afraid.

“You’ll have to tell me the story of every one,” she entreats, and there is something swelling in Newt’s chest.

“Of course,” he promises, and tries not to tremble too much when she brushes her fingertips over the chunk taken out of his side, the claw marks across his stomach. “Leta,” he warns, when she skates over the trail of hair on his belly, and then curses involuntarily when she touches the heavy bulge in his trousers. Newt flushes scarlet.

“Yes, Newt?” she asks, her eyes innocent. But Newt knows better; she has his erection in her hand, and she is stroking him through his trousers in a way that says she knows exactly how to touch a man. And Newt _is_ a man, for all he often feels like he does not fit anywhere in this world, only at peace with his creatures and far, far away from humans.

Leta is human. And he does not want to be far away from her. Rather, he cannot get close enough.

“You’re going to start something you’d best be prepared to finish,” he warns her. Leta’s smile turns dark, and Newt gasps, jerks forward into her touch when she slips her hand into his trousers to cup him through his pants, her palm radiating warmth.

“I think you’ll find I can finish anything I start, Mr Scamander,” she teases gently, and Newt bites his lip, trying not to buck into her grip. Leta’s smirk fades, becomes something much quieter and sweeter. “You’re so beautiful, Newt,” she murmurs, and Newt shakes his head because he’s not beautiful, he’s not, what a ridiculous thing to say –

But Leta’s eyes are grave and serious, and she wouldn’t lie, not to him. They’ve never been in the business of lying to one another.

“You have always seen me better than I am,” he says instead. Leta tosses her head.

“I see you exactly as you are,” she replies, and that, also, is true.

“You need to stop, Leta,” Newt tells her, and Leta cocks her head.

“Why?” she asks, genuinely surprised. Newt smiles at her.

“Otherwise this will be over far quicker than I would like,” he replies, and Leta’s eyes brighten.

“Regretfully, I must comply,” she says, and Newt misses the touch of her hand immediately, the heat of her lighting him up from the inside out.

“Come here to me,” Newt murmurs, and Leta tilts her face up to his.

“I love to listen to your voice,” she whispers, equally quiet. Newt buries his face in her hair so he doesn’t have to look at her face, with his heart brimming so full.

“Then I suppose I should say something,” he replies, easing the hemline of her dress down a little, running his hands up and down her back. Leta shivers in his arms. “I found a Demiguise,” he informs her. “Like we always talked about. He’s beautiful. I call him Dougal.”

Leta sighs in his arms.

“And – you’d never believe it, Leta…” He traces the curve of her shoulder, the delicate knobs of her cervical spine. “I was in Egypt, and I found a Thunderbird…” Newt skims his fingers under the lace of her chemise – and stops, when he feels something knotted and warped on her skin. His surprise must show, because Leta draws away, her face closing over as sharply as the snaps on his case. “Leta, don’t,” he tells her, and Leta hesitates. He can see her poised for flight.

“Please don’t look…” she says, her voice so quiet Newt can barely hear her.

“It’s all right. Really, it is,” Newt assures her, and slowly she lets him touch her again, her frame rigid. “What happened?” he asks, easing one slim strap down her arm, allowing him greater access to her back. Leta shrugs, but Newt doesn’t have to be a Legilimens to detect the strain in her, to hear the thoughts she’s practically screaming with her tense posture and wild eyes.

“Father likes his daughters silent and obedient,” she mutters, as Newt runs his hand over a twisted scar. Leta adds, with a ghost of a smile (and doesn’t it horrify Newt, that she can smile about something like this): “You know I have trouble on both of those counts.” There are too many wounds for Newt to count, decades of abuse, written on Leta’s skin – and that is just the ones he can see, over the hem of her chemise.

“Even at school?” Newt asks. Leta shudders.

“I was six the first time,” she confides to his shirtfront. Newt holds her a little tighter.

“I never knew,” Newt murmurs, stroking his way down a particularly knotted line.

“It’s more common than you think,” she says. “Pureblood girls are property, not people. It’s deemed very important that we adhere to the party line.”

“And when you don’t…” Newt says, but he trails off. He doesn’t want to hear it, almost as much as he needs to know.

“The Cruciatus Curse is illegal, but flogging your daughter until she can’t walk is still acceptable,” Leta says, utterly wooden, like the hurt has been bled out of the words. “As long as you never talk about it at afternoon tea, of course. And if you use a cursed whip, the marks never fade. Marry her to a Dark-inclined wizard who likes his girls… _broken in_ , and it’s not an issue.”

“Oh, Leta,” Newt breathes, and tries to draw her closer to him. Leta’s chin comes up.

“I don’t want your pity, Newt,” she snaps. Newt tugs again, and after a moment she lets him put his arms around her. Newt feels the tension seeps out of her, like all she needed to let those years of torment go was for him to hold her close. Leta the seductress had been tempting.

Leta vulnerable is devastating.

“Then what do you want?” Newt asks her dark curls. Leta sighs against his chest.

“Just make me feel good, Newt,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt anymore.” And how can he resist, when he has her so close, the scent of her as intoxicating as Amortentia, the thump of her heart against his own in his chest like coming home.

“Leta,” Newt sighs, and tips up her chin, kisses her nose, her eyelids, her beloved tired face. “All you ever had to do was ask.” Her eyes are bright enough to mimic the stars, and no one who sees her like this could ever think any part of her was Dark.

“Love me, then, Newt,” she says, and it’s all he’s ever wanted, and if a tiny part of Newt can’t forget Tina Goldstein no matter how he tries, then no one needs to know that but him.

“Of course.”


	2. all that is me is gone

She lets him strip her, and Newt tries to ignore that his hands, so steady at potion making or Transfiguring or tending to his beloved creatures, are shaking violently. Leta doesn’t seem to notice either, but that might be because she is sitting there in nothing but her step-in chemise as Newt inches a stocking down her leg. “Such concentration, Newt,” she teases, and Newt sneaks a smile up at her, setting the silk down gently on the nearby armchair.

“it’s a delicate business, undressing a woman,” he replies, only half paying attention to his words. Leta makes a soft noise.

“Have you undressed many women?” she asks archly. Newt looks up, acutely aware he made have put his foot in it, but Leta is smiling. She doesn’t seem jealous.

“None like you,” Newt says. Leta leans down and pecks him on the nose.

“You’re sweet,” she informs him. Newt flushes all the way to his unruly fringe.

“You’re pretty,” he mumbles, slipping the other stocking from her leg. Leta strokes a hand through his hair, and Newt feels it all the way down to his toes.

In truth, he hasn’t undressed any woman before, not really. The two girls he’d bedded in the past had been well enough – the first to lose the burden of his virginity, when he was on the Eastern Front, wrestling with dragons and trying to forget Leta, the possibility of death ever looming. And the second two years ago, quite by accident. It had been… nice. Comfortable. It hadn’t been like this.

Leta tilts his chin up, and Newt belatedly realises he’s still kneeling on the floor before her, in a reversal of earlier that somehow feels much more natural and right. He’s caught in her eyes, and he can’t look away. When she kisses him, as sweet and slow as falling in love, Newt surges up to meet her. “I can think of other things you could do while you’re down there,” Leta murmurs against his lips, and Newt raises an eyebrow, hoping it appears wry, when in actuality he’s bloody confused.

“What… exactly… are you talking about?” he asks, after the silence goes on a beat too long. Leta seems to decide to take pity on him.

“Kiss,” she directs, and puts her delicate ankle in his hands. Newt grins, and bends his head to her skin. This, he knows how to do. He peppers kisses up her calf, traces his tongue over the delicate inside of her knee – Leta shudders and her hand clenches in his hair. It should be painful, but it isn’t. It’s a comfort.

“Higher,” she says breathily, and Newt’s head flies up with an expression he just knows is comically bewildered. Kiss her _there_ – he didn’t even know that was an actual behaviour, he’d thought maybe it was just some bizarre deviant thing that only _he’d_ thought of –

“People do that?” Newt blurts out, and could sink through the ground in humiliation. Leta throws her head back and laughs, but it’s not cruel.

“Sometimes,” she says, still smiling, but he must look horrified, because she suddenly looks unsure. “You don’t have to,” she says, shrinking back on herself a little. Newt looks up at her.

“It’s not that!” he says sharply. “I just – don’t know how.” Leta smiles.

“I can teach you,” she offers. “If you want to.” Newt finds himself smiling back.

“Hopefully I’ll be better at this than I was at sixth-year Potions, before you tutored me,” he says. Leta smacks him gently on the shoulder.

“You just needed to chop your ingredients more finely and for Merlin’s sake measure the liquids you pour in your cauldron,” she tells him. Newt rolls his eyes.

“So you’ve told me a thousand times,” he teases gently, and returns his gaze to the uncharted territory. She’s still wearing her chemise, but it doesn’t hide much. And Newt should feel like an idiot, kneeling shirtless on the floor in front of a beautiful semi-naked woman, but then this is Leta, who knew him when he burned off his eyebrows, who sneaked him his very first unknown egg to hatch, who he’d found crying in the first-floor girl’s bathroom in her third week at Hogwarts (Newt had been in there chasing an escaped Kneazle). They’ve known each other too long and too well for this to be awkward.

Newt bends his head forward, kisses her thigh. Leta exhales slowly, her legs falling open a little more, and Newt gathers all his courage, tentatively mouths at her over the silk of her undergarments.

He’d have learned to do this years ago, if he’d known the reaction he was going to get. Leta’s hips tilt up to him instinctively, her head falls back, a soft gasp falling from her lips. And then: “Newt,” she sighs, and Newt’s blood is on fire, he’s hard enough that it feels like there’s no blood left to fuel his brain, but he hardly needs his brain, when he has Leta. He can taste her, through the silk of her chemise; he’s never tasted a woman before, at that soft, secret place, and he doesn’t know how he managed to reach twenty-nine without ever trying.

He must be doing something right, because Leta is making noises like she’s trying to catch her breath but can’t. Still, Newt pulls away, looks up at her; there’s something wild in her eyes, like a caged animal struggling to be free. “Leta?” he asks cautiously.

“Newt,” she replies breathlessly, and hauls him up into her arms.

She kisses like a storm, like she wants to consume him whole, and Newt doesn’t recall ever being touched before with this much passion. He’d always assumed that one day, when he was ready to settle down, he’d find the right _(Tina)_ woman and that lovemaking would start to make sense. He wouldn’t feel divorced from his body throughout the proceedings, wouldn’t feel like he was just running through the motions, practising for an event he had no hope of truly understanding. But this, this he understands, this he can drown in and move to, like hearing music for the first time, or breathing air.

Leta’s hands are working determinedly at his trousers buttons; Newt shoves the straps of her chemise down, and suddenly her breasts are free, pale and glorious, nipples rosy and hard and the prettiest things he can ever recall wanting to taste. And that sound, oh, that sound that Leta makes when he gets his mouth on her, even as she wrestles him free of his trousers and takes him in hand –

“Move,” she’s muttering, and Newt leans away just enough to give her the room to kick her chemise to the floor, and he’s naked, naked with Leta Lestrange, tangled up in her, on a bed barely big enough to fit one. Her hair is tousled and wild, Newt knows his own can’t be much better, and he’s never been this naked before with anyone.

It seems right, somehow, that it should be her he feels this newness with, this sense of infinite possibility. It all began with Leta. It seems only right it should circle back around to her as well.

Leta sinks down onto him, and Newt doesn’t dare close his eyes, not even for a moment.

He doesn’t want to miss a heartbeat worth of this.

 

These are the things that Newt will remember, when he’s old, when he and Tina have been together for so long that he has almost forgotten what it has like to be with another woman.

Leta, her dark hair falling around them both like a cloak, her bare breasts brushing his chest as she moves over him.

The bitten back gasps she made, until Newt had twisted his fingers in her and she’d nearly arched of the bed, whimpering his name.

That the moonlight had turned her skin to cream, had silvered the room and spilled through the drapes like handfuls of spilled salt.

And that after, when the fever had left his blood, that Newt had felt something like shame well up in his chest. He’d turned away, hunching his shoulders, and of course Leta had noticed.

“Newt,” she had whispered, her hand on his cheek, guiding his face to meet her eyes. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” Newt had retorted on reflex, but it had been a lie. Even he could feel how he'd been trembling.

“Then what’s bothering you?” she'd asked, curled up around him like a shield. Newt had tilted his head so he wouldn't have to look at her. It’s easier, to address the wall rather than her ink-dark eyes.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this,” he'd murmured, and he's been able to feel Leta’s smile against his skin.

“Actually, I believe I might have an inkling,” she'd replied, and Newt couldn't help it, he'd rolled them both over until she’s underneath him, his hips cradled between her thighs. Leta’s eyes had been as bright as the first lick of dawn light over the horizon. “Why, Mr Scamander,” she;d teaseed. “You have something there for me.” Very deliberately, she'd arched against him.

Newt had flushed all the way to the roots of his hair. But he had not stopped.

 

The sky is lightening through the window, and Newt is awake. Truthfully, he’s not yet been to sleep, because Leta is in his arms and who needs sleep at a time like this. Her face is pressed against his chest, and Newt has his own comfortably tucked into her neck; it’s the closest thing to paradise he’s known since the time he found an untouched forest in Uganda just _brimming_ with rare magical creatures.

He really ought to tell Leta about that.

Instead, because he’s an idiot, he says something completely different.

“I met someone,” Newt blurts. “In New York.” Leta’s hand, idly stroking over the healed burn on his shoulder, stills.

“I imagine you met rather a lot of people,” she says, but her tone isn’t right, it’s sharp at the edges yet muted, like she is stifling some deep emotion. “New York is a very large city, after all.”

“You know what I mean,” Newt mutters into the curve of her neck, shielded by the dark fall of her hair. Leta sighs.

“I do know,” she says, and shifts, tugging her hair back so she can peer down into his eyes. “You’re a good man, Newt. You deserve to be happy.”

“And what if you make me happy?” Newt asks quietly. Leta sighs.

“I’m a Lestrange,” she reminds him, much as she’d used to in school. “It’s not the life someone as good as you should ever come close to.”

“You shouldn’t have to endure it either,” Newt replies. Leta turns over in his embrace, her back to Newt’s chest, the odd texture of her scars brushing his skin. Newt presses a kiss to the curve where her shoulder meets her neck, and Leta snuggles back into him, a soft noise in her throat, the closest thing to raw contentment Newt has ever heard.

“I have this,” she says. “When I’m in the thick of it, I can remember this. It’s not so bad.” She turns over in his embrace. “Beloved,” she says softly, and brushes back the hair from his forehead. “Be loved, Newt. It is the only victory that lasts.”

As ever, she is right.

And somewhere across the sea, there is Tina.


End file.
